Abdullah al-Janabi

Abdullah al-Janabi (1951-) was the former Sunni chief of the Mujahideen Shura Council in Fallujah, Iraq and the main preacher of the Islamic State.

Biography
Abdullah al-Janabi was born in 1951 in Iraq to a Sunni Muslim family, and he became a radical Islamist preacher; Saddam Hussein banned him from preaching under Ba'athist Iraq. When the Iraq War began in 2003, he became the chief of the Mujahideen Shura Council in Fallujah, and he fought against the United States in two battles for the city. He evaded American forces during the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004, and on 9 January 2005 an warrant for his arrest was issued by the Central Criminal Court. When Fallujah fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in January 2014, he returned to the city and made weekly sermons at the Saad ibn Abi Waqqas mosque, announcing the "Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" to strictly enforce sharia law in the city and rallying the people of Fallujah against the Shi'ite police and the "Safavid" Iranian military.